The graphics card market is as competitive as the CPU market and AMD have recently released their latest weapon, the Radeon HD 4890. We take a look at it in the form of ASUS' Extreme AH4890 to find out what's so curious about AMD's newest GPU chipsets. From a pure specifications point of view, it is more of an overclocked version of their Radeon HD 4870. But that was to be expected as soon as we heard that this card would not be a 40nm nor having an increase in shaders, though has been improved to be able to attain higher clock speeds. And that is exactly what they have done, though at the same time renamed their chip which is now known as the RV790 chipset still on 55nm process. - t-break

ASUS Extreme AH4890 1GB Voltage Tweaker Review

The Extreme AH4890 package features a red box with a silver knight on the front, which is some new design that ASUS has created to differentiate it from their previous released products. Their board uses the same stock heatsink from ATI but with an ASUS sticker on it. And the heatsink looks identical in design to the one used on Radeon HD 4870 cards. The PCB's length and width are the same as Radeon HD 4870 cards and also is the color. The Radeon HD 4890 packs two CrossFire connecters, which enable it to run with up to four similar cards in a quad CrossFire solution and requires two 6-pin power cables to function properly.

ASUS has always shipped its products with great packaging and the Radeon HD 4890 part is no exception. Beyond its attractive box, the Extreme AH4890 also proved a strong performer. Running at standard core and memory frequencies, the card returned numbers that placed it between NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 275 and GeForce GTX 285 graphics card series. In our 3DMark Vantage test the card outperformed the older Radeon HD 4870 card by thousend points and moving to DirectX 10.1 games the Radeon HD 4890 managed to outperform the GeForce GTX 285 and returned the highest frame rates we've seen in CrossFire mode.

We were able to overclock the Radeon HD 4890 quite easily using RivaTuner. We managed to crank the core clock to 950MHz and the memory to 4500MHz. Running the card at these frequencies, we ended up with a 3DMark Vantage score of 12494 points. Monitoring the card's temperature and noise output, we have to say the Extreme AH4980 doesn't fair well on the noise front. Running 2D applications the fan runs at low speed and is somewhat audible. Under load, the fan runs at a higher speed and was able to maintain a temperature of 66°C. Unfortunately at the higher fan speed the card is quite noisy.